Dead State Design Update
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1513
Since the player is exploring stores, fast food places, and commercial districts for food and other items, there are a great deal of logos and products required for the game. Obviously, we can't just use real logos and products, so we have one artist on the team who primarily does all the ads, mascots, and sign graphic design. You may have seen the MMM, Bison! mascot on our first batch of photos that's only one of the designs from the MMM, Bison set of images created for the art and items in that store.
Now let's walk through the process of creating our fake brands in the game. The first step is to figure out what we're going to get the most use out of. Most fast food places have identical buildings, so creating different restaurants is only a matter of swapping the logos and color schemes, meaning we can get a lot of use out of tweaking one particular map. One of those art requirements for the fast food place is a soda fountain, which means we need fake sodas. We decided to make a couple different brands, since not only is soda an item in the game, but there is a need for logos on vending machines, store signs, billboards, t-shirts, and pretty much anything that needs advertising.
The next step is to figure out some names and sometimes a general theme for the logo. For the soda logos, I came up with some fake product names after doing trademark/copyright searches. I then sent a list to Brandon (one of our artists) to come up with some designs. Even if we're fairly specific about a design, Brandon will send back an art sheet with several different designs for us to choose from. Unless we ask him to tweak an image or take it in a different direction, we'll usually vote on the design we like best and that image becomes our default image for that product. Here's the design sheet for our newest cola Splesh.
